KAMON GiLBERT WOKE UP ON THE MORNiNG OF THE LAST DAY OF HiS LiFEAT 6:19 AND iN THE MiNUTE BEFOREHiS ALARM WENT OFF THOUGHTSOMETHiNG TO THiS EFFECT: TO EXiSTiN SPACE, TO HAVE A BODY THAT CAN BE AROUSED, SENSES THAT GiVE PROOF OF JOY, TO BE iN LOVE, TO BE iN LOVE AND

alive, to love Jenny Templin and to know Jenny loved him, to know the feeling of love, to know they'd have a child soon--why, it was all a fortunate accident, luck, a gift of chance, one sperm out of millions, one egg with the odds against it, the world already crowded, stasis always easier than growth, nothing always dominating something, so life could never be more than a minute fraction of its own potential--

".-.-.-'Cause the Sunshine Boy got the weather for you right after-.-.-."

Kamon slammed his hand down on the clock radio's snooze button. Jenny stirred beside him but remained asleep. She'd thrown off the sheets and blankets during the night, and Kamon had only to lift her T-shirt to reveal the mountain of her belly. He lay beside her, resting on an elbow, and with his free hand felt the taut skin hiding the form that would be their child in two months. And he went right on thinking:

An image like stepping-stones, patches of light on custard skin, drawing his mind not from foreground to background, as it would have if he'd composed the shot (knowing as he did a little, far too little, about monocular perspective), but from foreground to that dimension behind any image--the past. All images had stories to tell, causes to explain. In the case of Jenny's swollen belly, the cause was, as Kamon had put it to his friends, "bumping without a body bag." He was proud of what they'd done, their exquisite faith in each other, and yeah, he'd been dismayed when she refused to have it undone, yet by then he was hopelessly in love with her, loving their dark/pale symmetry, loving what he hoped to make her, bringing her along up through life as he went up instead of kicking her to the curb, which is what his cousin Taft told him to do. Oh, Taft liked to give her the red-eye now that they were living in his apartment, never mind what he said. He enjoyed Jenny Templin's good looks even if he liked to say that Kamon's life was damn well over, an opinion that became to Kamon an energizing challenge. He was just beginning--he knew this for a fact, knew that while other guys would have walked away from the situation, he was going to stick it out with Jenny, make himself a family to take care of, and go on loving what he already loved: the girl made of velvet opening her legs to him, going up with him when he went up.

Don't mind that she's white.

Loving her not because of the color of her skin, though not in spite of it, either. He'd admit there were times he minded. He'd even found himself wishing, once things started to get heavy, that she'd spent longer in the oven and been roasted to a darker shade. But he loved what they became together, their contrasts, the balance of light and shadow. Stepping-stones of light. He knew how to look at them together, his hand many shades darker than her belly, the picture enhanced by contrast. Yet what he really wanted was to move the image through the lens of a camera and save it once and for all on paper.

He just had to keep himself from going too fast. Had to learn all he could about the behavior of light during an interval of time. Had to take advantage of time and get himself properly educated. He could look all he wanted, but he had to get educated if he meant to turn looking into a trade and move up from the bottom. He never doubted his potential. He was busting with talent--everyone thought so. Kamon Gilbert, seventeen years old, acting day in and day out like a celebrity, pretending that he couldn't help being as handsome as his daddy, smart to boot, and quick and good at everything he tried out, his special destiny written all over him, bringing girls in a bar over to his table to ask, "Who are you? You must be someone famous.-.-.-."

Not yet, baby girl, but soon, as long as he didn't lose his way. Sticking to a white girl who was having his child might have added to his journey an extra loop, but he hadn't stopped heading up. If anything, Jenny made him more bent on doing the best he could. Maybe she wasn't busting with talent like Kamon, but she had a kind of courage he could learn from--the courage to try anything, to pick up and start over. She was no average recruit. Why, look at her. Keep looking. The soft point of her chin. The curve downward at the corners of her almond eyes. All the shades of yellow and brown in her hair. Her lips slightly parted. Her tongue moving inside her mouth as she dreamed of love.

Dreaming, wasn't she, of what they'd done? Kamon lying flat as a carpet runner while Jenny licked the salt off him. Jenny straddling Kamon, Kamon straddling Jenny, Kamon building up wet friction, feeling the thrill, again and again, of making love as though for the first time, brown nipple filling his mouth, bodies lying side by side, front to back, upside down, the furnace inside her, cold toes curling against her calves, lips latched onto the ridge of his collarbone, thoughts all jumbled by pleasure, his pleasure shored up by his faith in eternity and hers by fear, Kamon assuming they'd love each other forever, Jenny assuming that something this good couldn't last.

Kamon watched her sleep, thinking about how they'd climb back into this same bed at the end of the day and make love as best they could, lifting themselves up and over the custard mountain of their baby, and when they were done they'd wonder how that mountain would ever come out of her, their baby growing bigger every day.

No denying their lives would have been easier if Jenny had agreed to give up that clump of cells inside her before it got itself a soul. But she wanted a baby, so Kamon made himself want what she wanted, accepting fatherhood as another challenge and thinking ahead, trying to imagine the face of his child but unable to sort through all the possible images to find the one that would greet him in two months, reminding himself as he lay there, his hand still resting on Jenny's belly, that he sure had plenty to learn about photographic composition before his child was born, especially if he wanted to make a record of the baby's opening act. And this kind of thinking made him consider how proud he was to be fathering a child who'd be as lucky as this child, what with Kamon and Jenny and all of Kamon's family loving him as they would, Kamon and Jenny heading up in the world, up and up and up, nothing stopping them as long as they made the necessary effort.

Yeah! exclaimed the baby, shifting abruptly, pressing an eager foot into the wall of its sac, a motion that felt to Kamon like a mouse bouncing against his palm, transforming his pleasant, lazy contemplation into awe. A body inside a body, one asleep, the other awake--Christ almighty! Fucking weird, man! He'd like to catch that on film somehow, some way: motion inside stillness. Except he'd used up his allotment of contact paper at school and couldn't afford to buy more and had sworn off begging extras from his art teacher, Mr. Manelli, a white hot-sauce boss who made it all too clear that Kamon was his favorite.

Which reminded him, oh shit, that he was supposed to have finished Hamlet for his English class. See you later, peanut! He pulled the sheet over Jenny's bare belly, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and turned off the pending alarm on the clock radio. He dressed quickly in jeans and a ratty T-shirt under his flannel shirt and walked in bare feet along the cold hallway of his cousin Taft's apartment to the kitchen. He made coffee, and while the coffee was dripping, he ate two big bowls of cereal and paged through the final scenes of Hamlet, got as far as the sparrow's providential fall, and chose to spend the last minutes before he left the apartment not finishing the play but instead grooming himself in the bathroom, for wasn't it more than likely that his English teacher would assign him the role of Hamlet during class? He'd already read the parts of Romeo and Julius Caesar. And now this: If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now.

AT 3:05 P.M., TWO OLD WOMEN IN THE EAST AVENUE McDonald's waited at the counter for their order. One said, "I got mice. Mice!"

Kamon stood behind them but moved forward when a girl appeared at another register to take his order. He bought a large milk shake and fries and walked to a far booth so he could be alone and spend a few minutes calming himself down, untying the knot of anger, loops as tight as the muscles in his neck after a day spent at the snake pit that was his school, every student there bent on bringing Kamon down--hating him, if they were white, because he was a nigger, hating him, if they were black, because he was exceptional when measured against the rest of them by the teachers and their standardized tests. Kamon Gilbert this and Kamon Gilbert that. Kamon, you're jack shit, busting your balls over white pussy. So he kept to himself between classes, and he stopped eating lunch altogether so he wouldn't have to face the cafeteria mob. And at the end of the school day, he always ended up here, at the McDonald's across from the garage where he worked, so hungry that he ate two fistfuls of fries as he walked to the table.

A few minutes later, he took the lid off his milk shake and shook the last bit into his mouth. He stood up again, noticing with some pleasure that the white lady with mice in her apartment reached for her purse and placed it securely on her lap as he passed behind her chair. She kept her back to him, but her friend followed Kamon with her eyes, that ancient terror making her hands tremble just enough that a few drops of coffee splashed out of her wobbly cup and she had to set it down.

Kamon couldn't leave without saying hello. He stopped in front of the door, swung around, and as he pulled on gloves, filthy black woolen gloves snipped to leave his fingers bare, he said, "Afternoon, ladies!" They didn't reply. "I was wondering if you knew the time?" They were silent for a period that threatened to stretch into tomorrow, until finally the lady with the mice turned to look straight at Kamon and, without glancing at her wristwatch, said, "Three-eighteen," grinning warmly as though to signal her forgiveness.

"That's all right then," Kamon said, returning the smile. But his smile was ineffectual, or else the lady proved more resilient than he'd expected. She kept grinning, leaving him nothing else to do but nod his farewell.

At the garage he found the owner, Paul, at his computer, tapping numbers into the customer-service program. "Fucking gas thief," Paul muttered, banging his index finger against the enter key in an attempt to pound information out of the computer. He snatched a set of keys from a drawer and threw them at Kamon, who had yet to speak.

"Tan Honda Civic, '87 or '88." Paul scribbled the license number on a piece of scrap paper. "Get the bastard," he growled, pressing the paper into Kamon's hand.

So someone had driven away without paying for their gasoline. Another fucking runner, another gas thief, petty stuff--the police had better things to do than respond to such a complaint. If Paul wanted the money for his gasoline, he had to track down the thieves on his own. He'd copy the plate number from the video and try to find the owner's name in the computer's database--with a name and address, he could send a nasty letter. Without the information, his only chance of reimbursement was to catch the crooks on the road. And since Paul himself had better things to do than go chasing cars like a dog, he usually sent one of his mechanics, whoever happened to be close by.

Kamon took Paul's Corvette and headed in the direction Paul had pointed him, knowing that he didn't have much of a chance of catching up to the Civic but thinking that if he did, he'd force the guy off the road, flashing that friendly smile of his, waving through the window, mouthing happily, I'm gonna kill you! Problem was, Kamon couldn't read Paul's handwriting, so when he did spot a tan Honda Civic a few miles down the road, he couldn't be sure whether the driver, a middle-aged Asian woman, was really his fugitive. He decided against a confrontation, just drove on in a leisurely way for a while, thinking that he didn't mind working for Paul, not just because the pay was good or because he got to take Paul's Corvette for a spin once in a while, but because the other mechanics didn't despise him. In the garage, unlike at school, Kamon was considered good enough, not worse because he was better than the rest of them in any obvious way.

Good enough to grab a quarter-inch ratchet from the toolbox for Paul's cousin Jeff, who when Kamon returned to the garage was in the process of prying off a brake shoe, but not so good he could upload the idle speed into an engine computer or scan information about a malfunctioning brake system or change the setting on a lock. Good enough to work the alignment machine and balance the wheels on an '89 Ford Escort and, of course, to straighten up the drawer of midsized screwdrivers, but not good enough to explain to the owner of a '92 Saab that he would have to pay one hundred thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents just so Paul could take apart the fuel-injection system to find out what was wrong, because the car's diagnostic system couldn't find the problem.

"Kamon, grease the rod ends of this dinky, will ya?"

So Kamon pulled the grease gun away from the bulk oil dispenser and started filling up an outer rod end, stopping a second too late--thick black grease bubbled out of the ball joint and splattered his shirt. Paul was still on the phone with a customer, and Darryl had stepped behind the alignment rack to help Jeff with the brake shoe, so no one noticed Kamon's mistake. He wiped the grease with a gloved hand and moved beneath the car to get at the inner joint, listening as he worked to a song on the radio: "My snake-hipped, red-lipped, wild revolutionary man-.-.-."

Paul was honest and fair, though permanently angry at the world, with his spongy features bunched up in a scowl and his voice crackling with resentment. By his own account, he'd never recovered from the change in the industry, twenty years ago, to the metric system. He had two large cabinets for tools--just to see them made him mad, since back in the old days a mechanic needed a single drawer of tools, sizing was simple, and an experienced mechanic could measure a socket with his eye. With the metric system, the fucking metric system, nothing was simple. Yet Paul continued to blame himself for the confusion and slammed his hand against something hard whenever he grabbed the wrong ratchet. What's experience worth when everything's changing so fast? He'd tried out that question on Kamon more than once, and Kamon had tried out an answer:

What was he talking about? Smart-ass Kamon, he should have learned from experience to keep his mouth shut, since what he couldn't do was explain himself accurately. He was quick at calculations, could write an elegant sentence, could take a fine photograph, but he couldn't explain how to do any of it and so couldn't make himself understood.

Kamon finished greasing the front rod ends, then moved to the rear of the car, listening as he worked to a song by Blind Willie Johnson on the radio: "Jesus, make up my dying bed-.-.-." And while he squirted grease, Kamon started thinking something like this: How much easier it would be to give up all his ambitions, drop out of school, and work for Paul full-time. If he kept working in the garage the rest of his life, he'd be a good enough mechanic, nothing special. He'd earn good enough money, enough to support his family, and if Jenny went back to work they'd have more than enough, and maybe they'd have a few more babies and eventually they'd buy a house of their own, his folks would watch the babies so Jenny and Kamon could go out, catch a movie, go dancing even, and they'd have friends who wouldn't hate them, they'd have fun, and the only pictures Kamon would ever take would be the ones for Jenny to put in their albums to serve as a visible measure of time.

Kamon lifted the edges of his gloves and pulled them inside out and off his hands, then held his dirty hands close to his face to breathe deeply that intoxicating smell of oil and gasoline and grease.

Yeah, this would be a good enough life, he thought again. As good a life as any he could imagine.

6:25, KAMON AND JENNY ATE SAUSAGE-AND-PEPPER pizza and watched a reporter on the local news make a pitch for an animal shelter, asking viewers to consider adopting one or more of the dozens of cats taken from a filthy house on the south side, the owner a feeble, eighty-seven-year-old woman. Then at

6:37 Jenny went to pee and Kamon began his homework, reading the assigned chapter about ionic bonds, the donation of electrons, the positive ion of sodium, the negative ion of chloride, the miracle of sodium chloride, the process of molecular dissociation. While he was reading, Jenny tiptoed behind him and started to massage his shoulders, and Kamon would have given himself over to her if Taft hadn't walked in right at

7:00, ducking into the kitchen, snatching a piece of cold pizza from the table in front of Kamon's textbook, muttering his end-of-the-day greeting, something like Heya, or Hey there, before sinking his teeth into the pizza and disappearing into his bedroom, leaving Jenny and Kamon alone again, though now Jenny had turned back to the television and with the remote changed the channel to a game show, which she and Kamon watched until

7:15, when a commercial for Worthco Appliances came on and Jenny said about her stepdad, who worked for Worthco, "I wish that asshole would drop dead," and Kamon said, "Make peace with him--maybe he'll give us a washing machine," and Jenny said, "Yeah, right," both of them watching in silence until

7:30, and then Kamon continued with his homework and Jenny lay on the sofa and read a magazine. The basketball game started at

9:00, so she and Kamon sat on the sofa together and Taft sat on his Taft throne, a plump, ragged, pinstriped armchair he'd found on the street. They shouted at the television, cursed the referees, cheered on the players, and threw pillows across the room when someone missed a free throw, until

11:15, when Taft offered to pay Kamon twenty dollars just to go out and get him some cigarettes, so Kamon put on Taft's jacket and his own orange ski hat, kissed Jenny goodbye, and headed to the deli, thinking as he went that his cousin Taft was dumber than dumb and bullish enough that Kamon didn't feel badly about taking advantage of him, charging twenty dollars for an errand that would cost Kamon no more than twenty minutes. Not a bad deal. But shit, he hadn't expected it to be so cold, and as he walked away from the apartment house he pinched the collar of his coat closed and ducked his head against the wind, continuing at a pace just short of a jog, so at

11:24:07 he had reached the corner of Buffalo Avenue and Raymond Street, and at

11:24:12 the door to the deli on the next block opened, and at

11:24:15 Kamon saw the two figures hurtling down the sidewalk toward him. His first confused thought, having spent the last two hours watching basketball, was that he was witnessing a calculated play in some kind of game, with the boys instructed by a coach to run just as they were and at some point to pivot as they continued to run and look back at the deli, gesturing with their handguns at the door, which was still in the process of easing shut on its springs. What they hadn't planned on was this: By the time they had turned their heads back in the direction they were sprinting, Kamon had already arrived on the scene and by his mere presence interrupted the smooth play, forcing the boy in front to sidestep to avoid him and causing the one behind to cross his right leg in front of his left and stumble, catch himself, then hit a patch of watery ice so his left foot slid out from under him and he fell down hard on his ass in front of Kamon, who, still confused, reached out a hand for the boy in order to help him to his feet and at

11:24:23 recognized, or thought he recognized, between the scarf wound around the boy's mouth and nose and the ski hat pulled low on his head, the eyes of someone he knew at school--What was his name?--someone who belonged to the mob of students who hated Kamon Gilbert, someone Kamon hadn't bothered to distinguish as an individual, so now he couldn't come up with a name, despite his sense of recognition. Who are you? Kamon wondered as he bent slightly at the waist, preparing to offer the boy an elbow, since the boy hadn't accepted his hand. Who are you? Feeling at once a sharp sensation of pity because the boy was obviously scared of him, though Kamon meant no harm and wanted to reassure him, started to consider what he might say, perhaps introduce himself, though if Kamon recognized the boy, then the boy surely recognized Kamon--everyone at school knew Kamon, Kamon Gilbert this and Kamon Gilbert that--and in fact he looked at Kamon now with a glittery squint as if to beg Kamon not to recognize him, a look so amusing that Kamon drew in a shallow inhalation, the kind that usually precedes a chuckle, and he would have started to laugh if at

11:24:45 he hadn't become suddenly aware of a pain in the side of his back, only afterward hearing the sound of the first shot, as though time were moving in reverse and whatever had just happened was already starting to undo itself, the pain returning to the sound of the shot, the sound preceding the catch of breath, the inhalation preceding the pity Kamon felt for the boy who'd slipped on the ice, the boy slipping in front of him but going up instead of down, rising toward the bare branches of the maple tree in front of the Presbyterian church while Kamon fell between two parked cars. He heard a brief clatter that reminded him of being a boy shaking a fistful of polished stones his daddy had given him, felt a spasm of pain at the same time, along with a new confusion, for the sequence had reversed itself again, but instead of moving forward, everything was happening at the same time, and the simultaneity seemed natural, as if life had always been this way--instants of multiple sensations, hearing and feeling and seeing the progression of an event within one moment, and within that same moment remembering with dreamy haziness, as Kamon did, that the two players running from the deli had been holding guns, realizing as he fell that he'd forgotten about the guns when he moved to help the second player to his feet, but the gun must have been there somewhere, on the ground, inside the boy's sleeve, somewhere, anywhere, yet the boy had been paralyzed with fear, so he couldn't have had the nerve to pull a trigger. Which immediately brought to mind the capability of the forward player. Yeah, it was possible that the shots still being fired as he fell were coming from the forward player's gun, a clatter of stones, pain within and without, the branches receding, the street rising up between two cars to smack him in the face at

11:24:52 as the boy he'd been trying to help scrambled to his feet and ran away after his teammate, the two players resuming the game that Kamon had interrupted, maybe just practice for the real thing, the important game scheduled for Saturday--you couldn't blame them, really, Kamon had gotten in their way, though you couldn't blame Kamon, he hadn't done anything wrong, he couldn't think of a single thing he'd ever done wrong in his whole life, so at

11:25:03 he asked himself, How did I come to be here? The last thing he remembered was the impulse to laugh, but already he'd forgotten what was so funny and felt a residual smile disappear from his face, like a fly taking off after picking up a crumb, leaving behind the itch, which Kamon would have scratched if he could have figured out how to get his hand to his mouth. He'd had a hand once, yeah, and he'd extended the hand to a boy who'd fallen on the sidewalk. But how could that be? Had he extended the hand to himself, left his body in order to lift his body to his feet? Where was he now? Outside with the pain or inside with the night? It was so dark inside, close to midnight, he figured, and he'd done just as his ma expected: What do you do when you leave the room, Kamon?

11:25:08 Turn off the light, so the room was the color of the grease overflowing from a ball joint, and somewhere in the lightless corner Darryl was laughing at his own bad joke, maybe the joke that had almost spurred Kamon to laughter himself, whatever it was, something that had to do with Jenny. Kamon couldn't feel her, but he could feel how he wanted her to hold him, to warm him with her electric warmth, for wouldn't you know that when pain leaves the body, it transforms into cold, drawing snow from the sky, brittle flakes moistening his cheeks. He would have brushed them away but he had misplaced his hands somewhere between his home and the deli, yeah, he'd been going to the deli, he remembered that much, to the deli for a carton of cigarettes, he'd made a deal with his cousin Taft and would earn twenty dollars for this errand. Go ahead, push Kamon around all you wanted, you owed him twenty dollars now if someone would please find his hands.

11:25:17 He'd get up and finish what he'd started, a life beginning with the clatter of stones, a fistful of polished stones and the bark of a magnolia scraping his arm as he climbed, the dribble of a basketball, the echo of voices in windowless hallways, the endless waiting, a beer and a red-hot smothered with onions, sodium chloride, contact paper, the shock of a mouse bouncing against his palm, the pop of a lightbulb, a darkroom, the pissing, the shitting, busting his balls over white pussy, a squirrel caught under the wheels of a moving car, food stamps in an old woman's purse, lemonade, cigarettes, music, magic tricks, and always the waiting, Jenny waiting for him to come home while Kamon waited in line for the Jack Rabbit and looked forward to the next ride, though the last time he'd coasted straight into a wall and ended up flat as a fruit roll. He'd have to pinch his skin and pull himself into a solid shape, Jenny would expect as much, but he discovered only then that he had lost his stuffing, there was nothing to hold his body together, he couldn't even stand up, he would never stand up, he would never find his hands again,

11:25:18 he would never be himself. He felt now what might be called panic but was a feeling too peculiarly Kamon's to be attached to a word and have sensible meaning. The recognition that he would no longer be who he'd been, even as he was still close enough to himself to understand this, produced a change in the pattern of his thinking, a change that felt palpably real, developing as it did from the experience of a loss, understanding as it happened that exactly when 11:25:18 became

11:25:19, the wafer of glass upon which his mind rested shattered, and thought burst from its reservoir like floodwater, traveling through the hollow package of his body in pursuit of the pain,

11:25:20 draining out of him onto the curb, so if he had been able to open his eyes he would have seen the last shreds of his comprehension lying in a wet pool of blood, insoluble thoughts, thoughts that only Kamon Gilbert could have thought, past thoughts and all the potential thought that would have come to him over a lifetime, leaving behind a brain as hollow as the body, knowing nothing about what had happened to him or how it had happened, unable to postulate what would become of the boys who had done this to him, boys who would live into their old age, each of them spending time in jail for other crimes but not for this, and who, by murdering Kamon Gilbert, had deprived him of the one wish he would have wished for, if he'd had a chance: